Not Your Average Tree Topper
by follyofyouth
Summary: Written for usb-dongle for the Portal Secret Santa Exchange. Chell celebrates Christmas outside of Aperture with some help from an unexpected house guest.


It wasn't ideal, but it was certainly better than freezing to death.

The building was long-abandonned, a relic of the war that must have wracked the world outside while she was trapped down below, running tests like some overgrown rat. The struggle had been brutal - that much she could tell; the blown-out glass of the windows in the basement and shattered front door were enough to tell her that. There was no blood, no bodies, but she didn't need either of those to tell her the family who once lived in the house was long gone.

Still, the upper floor was untouched and the fireplace in the master bedroom provided enough heat to keep the blood from icing in her veins as she slept. There were blankets in the hall closet and a few heavy coats in the attic. She had found women's clothes the first day she'd arrived; she hadn't donned the jumpsuit since. It now hung in front of the window now as a makeshift curtain.

She didn't like the cold quiet of nights. It made living in a world of ghosts even more lonely than it would have otherwise been. She didn't miss Aperture and she never would, but the silence she had never quite grown accustomed to was becoming oppressive.

Turning over under the mountain of blankets she'd built from quilts and coats, she resolved to find some way to break the silence.

* * *

There was a Christmas tree in the attic, damaged but salvageable, and a dew boxes of ornaments. She had found them months ago, back when she first discovered the house. She wasn't entirely certain of the date, but gathered from the cold and the ever-shortening days that Christmas was near; she decided the tree would make an appearance.

Christmas trees were among the things noticeably absent from her childhood - meaningful parental interaction and love were two others, but who was counting? Sure, she had seen them on the street, and in the malls, and in the homes of others as she glanced in. And sure, there was the gloriously outdated Aperture tree, a gaudy silver monstrosity dropping needles just like a real tree as miniature erlenmeyer flasks and beakers dangled precariously from its branches, always a few ounces too heavy to be completely supported. In short, it was the kind of hideous clusterfuck that only Aperture Science could pull off.

It was past time for a real tree.

She dragged it down gingerly, praying she wouldn't fall and bash her head coming down the attic's rickety wooden ladder. As her foot touched the ratty hall runner, she let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding.

Next came the ornaments. They were easier, less risky. She could tuck a box under one arm and hold on with the other. If she dropped a box, so be it. They were things. God knows she'd broken plenty of those in her time; she felt a smile tugging at her lips at the memory of all the cameras she'd dropped in acid or knocked off the walls on the testing tracks.

By the time she was done, she was cold and tired and badly in need of a rest. Sitting down on top of the companion cube and giving it an affectionate pat, she poked at the fire with a poker, realizing she'd soon have to venture out to retrieve some of the wood she'd found in the garage.

The dark is coming soon, and with it, a cold deeper and longer lasting than the one already seeping through the walls. Shrugging into a coat and boots, Chell sighed. The tree could wait another day.

* * *

There are meteors that night : bright molten pinpoints crossing the sky in arcs that never once give hint that their creators are damn deadly. They cut through swaths of inky blue on their way to some unknowable destination.

In the crowd of burning rocks, though, is something incongruous. Something small and round and metal. Something with an eye that tracks and blinks. Something with a curiously West Country accent. Something that's screaming.

Wheatley had never been so glad to have been built to Aperture's frankly freakish standards. Remaining operational up to 4000 Kelvin was never supposed to come in handy; neither was being able to survive a crush force of 5000 Newtons.

And yet, here he was, hurtling through the atmosphere, crashing towards Earth after having been bumped by a bit of space garbage.

Brilliant. Bloody brilliant. Yes, he wanted to go home, but honestly, he'd been hoping to get there in one piece, not one million. From somewhere within his programming, images flashed, born of binary and the man he couldn't remember. There was gas and a jolt of pain, and warmth and a pretty woman with dark hair and a smile.

At a loss for the woman's identity, his code instead snapped to Chell. Great. Brilliant. Exactly what he wanted to be his last thoughts to be. Tumbling through the cold night air, he absolutely completely wanted to think about how he had stupidly cocked-up the only real friendship he could remember. Fabulous. Just fa-

He was cut off mid-thought by a tree, abruptly halting his fall. The trunk snaps in half, and oh man alive, back to falling again.

Finally, he comes to rest on a snowbank in front of a ruined house, under a sky scarred by meteors and flecked with stars.

* * *

She wasn't proud to admit that when she first saw the scarred metal orb half-buried in the snow, her first thought was to burn it. It's not that she has a problem with unkind thoughts. Oh, no. After what he did, Wheatley deserved every unkind thought she could muster. It was just embarrassing to admit that even after years and years in the bowels of Aperture Science, even after having spent hours and hours listening to GLaDOS and the other cores babble, after having watched the bitch resurrect, she had forgotten how difficult it was to good and kill a piece of Aperture technology.

He wasn't making a very good case for himself with his babbling, either. She didn't like the silence, no, but she wasn't wild about the unintelligible stream of words spewing forth from his speakers either.

Setting him on the battle-scarred table, she reserved to let him apologize for as long as she saw fit. In the meantime, she had a tree to decorate.

* * *

Rolling his optic about, he had to give her credit. It wasn't much, but it was shelter. He never thought she'd get that far, but in retrospect, he shouldn't have been surprised. She was always clever - whether he always saw it or not as a different matter.

* * *

There were ornaments, yes, and they were mostly intact. They even had hangers attached, a nice touch. On the tree, they really looked something. True, she would have liked lights, which had always seemed to her harbingers of a particular kind of magic, but overall, it was a lovely sight. And it was all hers.

The star, though, was nowhere to be found. She'd emptied the boxes, and even ventured back up into the attic and into the closets. Nothing.

It took her a moment, eyes scanning the room, to realize she had already found a suitable replacement topper.

* * *

On the upside, she had acknowledged presence and had done so in a way that hadn't resulted in his immediate, but probably deserved, destruction.

She had even accepted his apology with a pat on the head and a sort of funny smile. Sort of a smirky smile. In retrospect, that may have had something to do with the ridiculous position he was now in.

Chell sat sprawled on the bed, arms behind her to prop her up. She was right, he did make a pretty good substitute topper.

"Wheatley," she said, uttering her first words in who knows how long. "Merry Christmas."


End file.
